Apps and Programs to Make Your Life Easier

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, April 12th, 2017 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about us here at WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Greetings, Free Webinar Wednesday world. That's a tongue-tie.

I just kind of got a little tripped up on that.

Yeah, you're— you've changed your script. This is Jeff Simkins, and I am with Community Bank Consulting, Inc. You can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting, Inc. online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

So how goes your week, Mr. Simkins?

Well, it's hard to believe it's Wednesday, so I guess it's been busy.

Yeah, that's for sure. Just kinda flying right by.

Also hard to believe it's almost April 15th.

I know it. I know it. So, I didn't have this up prior to launch, but I wanted to since we didn't get a chance to officially celebrate it. I have Found our very first Free Webinar Wednesday. I'm just pulling it over on our screen, so let me know if you see it, Jeffrey. Our Podcasting 101, April 1st, 2009. Can you believe it?

Wow, 8 years.

Yeah, it, uh, it took me a little bit of digging, although thanks to the power of Google, I just typed in Free Webinar Wednesdays podcast because I knew that it was podcasting related. And there's 2 pages of podcasting-related webinars, which leads me to believe probably wouldn't be bad to come back because I think podcasting is starting to become a little bit more popular. And I know with the Amazon device who shall remain nameless but starts with an A, as well as my little Google device and my Pixel phone, I'm starting to see more voice-based information flowing through, and podcasts are being, I guess, easier to find and get access to without necessarily having to use a podcast player, go and subscribe. You can just bark a command at any one of those kind of voice-activated devices, and I can just ask it to play the most recent issue of This Week in Google, and it'll go out to the Twit network and pull in the most recent episode and start playing it for me. And I don't even need to be subscribed to it. It just finds it for me and brings it in.

So, you know— I absolutely agree with that. I hadn't thought about it until you said it, but I have never been much of a podcast kind of guy. I really like to read things, but since I now have an Amazon Tap sitting beside of my bed, There are actually 3 podcasts I listen to every morning now. I stream the New York Times news summary. I stream— and NPR has a really brief news summary called— I think theirs is called— the New York Times has 2. I listen to Summary of the Front Page plus one called The Daily. And then NPR has one as well. So, yep. I, uh, your point is, I think, very accurate.

Yeah, I try to do that every once in a while. So, you know, a blind squirrel catches a nut once in a great while. Oh, oh, too funny. Well, I guess before we launch into it too much further, let's cover our housekeeping items because I did want to ask a question, but I need to provide everybody with instructions on how to do this. If they so choose. As a reminder, today's show and all shows are available as recordings at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Unfortunately, some of our older ones, like this interview with Roger, is no longer available. So if you try clicking on that, that was linking to a service. I don't even exactly know where it was hosted, but it's been discontinued and it's been poof, disappeared. So I would say the last couple, maybe 2.5 to 3 years worth of webinars are all available because we start using the YouTube service, and that has allowed us to be able to go longer. It used to be restricted to like 12 or 13 minutes, and YouTube now allows pretty much unlimited. So we've gone ahead and moved everything. So all of our recordings are available online. You can check them out there. And then if you have comments, questions, or feedback— and what I was going to ask is if anybody out there listening live has a podcast or an audiobook Amazon device whose name starts with an A audio recording that they like to listen to, go ahead and type it into the chat or the questions and answer area. We'd love to hear what you're listening to as well. So you can interact with us through your control panel through GoToWebinar and let us know. And if you're catching this on replay and not listening live, feel free to post your comments into the comments section below all of the information that's above. So, I think Jeff and I are going to talk today about— and I hesitate calling it life hacks because I don't think we're really like totally deconstructing life and making it super duper easy by hacking the genome or doing anything out of the ordinary. But what I thought we would do is maybe revisit some of the tools, because I see a lot of fresh faces that haven't been on Free Webinar Wednesdays before. So welcome to those of you that are new. And just share some of the tools that Jeff and I use on a regular basis to try to let technology work for us. And I think there's the, the adage, you know, working smarter, not harder. And I think all too often when people get involved in technology and they start getting access to multiple devices, multiple screens, multiple accounts. It can be very overwhelming in a sense that you feel that there's an inefficient way of managing it all. And so I've got a few that I've teed up. I know Jeff will go and kind of pull some up as you kind of come along. But I wanted to spend at least— I don't know if we'll go the full hour. I always say that and we do. But I wanted to spend some time just kind of chatting about some of the tools that we use, and the majority of them are free. There are a couple that I'm paying for, and I'm happy to do so. But some of the tools that you might be able to use to let technology actually work for you instead of against you, which I don't know about you, Jeff, but oftentimes I feel like it is the contrary, that technology is working against me. So hopefully these will be helpful. So the first one that I have on my list is a service called If This Then That, IFTTT. And I've talked about this a couple of times. They've gone through a couple of changes. They create— used to be called recipes and now they're called applets. But essentially what If This Then That does, very similar to the name, is you create these little applets, almost like little micro programs, if you will, and tell them to do things for you based off of activity or actions or functions that the apps that you're connecting to are basically doing. Now, if that doesn't really sound like I've really explained it very well, the best thing to do is kind of look through Some of the examples. So these are the recommended applets that have been kind of sourced for me based off of my activity. But I'm going to go in and pull up my applets. And there's a couple of things here that I will show you. One of those just happens to be like this little guy right here. And so we use a support ticketing platform called Groove. So if anybody out there sends an email to support@poweredbywsi.com, that's our ticketing platform. It goes into Groove. Groove then sends a notification out to that customer@groovehq.com just to say somebody has logged a support ticket. And while that's well and good, and certainly I can check my inbox, email comes, uh, at a blistering pace these days.

Mm-hmm.

And if it's a support ticket, that means a customer has a request that they need attention to. And rather than wait for me to hop back into my inbox— I know some people are trying to get to the point where they only check their email once or twice a day so that they can focus on getting work done, as opposed to having to be a slave to their inbox and checking email all the time. So if you're somebody that does that, one of the things you may want to consider using a service like If This Then That is to take any emails that you would want to have kind of jump out of your email inbox and alert you to say, hey, this is important. I know you just checked email at 11 o'clock and you're not scheduled to do it again until 3, but somebody just sent you a support ticket. So you really are gonna wanna make sure you pay attention. And so what happens is within this recipe, you can see that I've actually connected 2 different services. I've connected my email through Gmail because we use the G Suite platform, and I've connected my telephone. And when you connect your phone, it asks you to provide your phone number. I think it asks you for your carrier, and it'll call or send a text message just to confirm that you're the owner of that device. And then once that device has been authenticated and confirmed that you own it, it can be used in a variety of different applets. So you can see when I get an email in my inbox that comes to customer@groovehq.com, The If This Then That system actually calls my phone, and it always calls from the same number. So I've actually created an entry in my address book for If This Then That because the service is always the same phone number, and I've assigned a different kind of annoying but yet notifiable and easily recognizable ringtone to that contact. So if that ringtone ever comes through on my phone, I know that it's a support ticket or an alert or notification or a web form submission, because anything that's coming through If This Then That is being identified separately and jumps out. I could have it send me a direct message on Twitter. I could have it send me a text message. I mean, there's a lot of other options that I can do with that as well. But in this instance, it calls my phone, and then a really annoying ringtone shows up, and Alicia's actually gotten to the point where she recognizes that ringtone over all the other ones and knows that if we're in the middle of a conversation and I hear that specific ringtone, that it's okay for me to interrupt the conversation and answer the phone, as opposed to— oh, I don't know, Jeff and I wanted to catch up and I'm talking to Alicia and Jeff calls. No offense, Jeff, but Alicia's probably going to want me to continue talking to her. But if it's a support-related issue or my alert ringtone goes off, then I do have spousal permission to be able to go ahead and pick that up.

No offense taken.

No offense taken. So exactly. So you can see Mark actually works on our team as well. He's part of our office. So if Mark happens to mention me in one of those tickets, it'll also send me a direct message on Twitter, which doesn't get as many tweets. I'm not tweet. Doesn't get as much activity as maybe a regular text message, so it kind of jumps out, but it also copies. So you can just kind of get an idea of some of the applets that I've created that just allow me. So there's certain customers that I have set up, but this just kind of gives me an idea of you know how I go about actually allowing technology to give me alerts. So. I haven't got to the point where I only check email a couple times a day. I'm still very much in my inbox on a regular basis. So I don't know if that's good or bad, but in the barrage of emails that come through, this service, at least from a support perspective, is one that just makes it really nice for me to be able to know when something jumps out and is important. So to build a new applet, it's just essentially you kind of say, well, click on this. So if I were to go ahead and, and say, let's say Gmail, I could say if somebody sends me a message, then you have a variety of different. So if it's a new email, if it's a starred item, and I've got a filter in Gmail that stars specific things for important elements. If I'm waiting for a particular attachment, it'll send me some of that information. But then I can go through and I can pick this. I can give it a label. So if I've got Jeff's emails coming to me and they're being automatically labeled as Free Webinar Wednesdays, I could put Free Webinar Wednesdays in here, and then anytime a Free Webinar Wednesday label comes through, I get notification. So if I scroll back a little bit before I jump right in, you can see that there's basically a 6-step process, or as they say in Canada, process. But look at all the different apps that are available. So if there's an app in here that I'm not currently using, I just go ahead— some of these I've not even ever even heard of before. But if there's an app that I'm not using, I can go in and I can simply click on it. It'll ask me to authenticate and connect. And then once that's done, then I have the ability to use that platform. And you can see the scroll bars over here. I'm not even halfway down on the list. So a lot of different applications that you can use to start building some efficiency. Within your, within your digital life.

So that's a lot you can do with If This Then That with the Amazon device that we'll refer to as Sally.

Yeah, Sally.

So I could go in.

Let's see. So here's the, here's Sally. Wink wink, nudge nudge. So you can see we can walk through, and if I utter a specific phrase, you know, look at all the elements that you can do. So when a timer goes off, a new song, sports team info. So further going back, this kind of ties into the podcasting comment at the beginning, but, you know, using these devices and not complicating our lives but making things easier. Voice navigation, you know, one of the services that we're starting to use for ADA accessibility for websites has a voice navigation functionality currently in beta that over time, as the learning takes place and it gets more efficient, will give visitors to sites that are protected by this service from AudioEye the capability of browsing a website very similar to using Siri on their iPhone. Because one of the things that I didn't realize, and it makes sense to me now, but Siri was actually created by Apple as an accessibility solution for blind people that they wanted to enable to use their phones and their devices. And they said, well, if they can't see the screen, we need to create a service, and Siri was created. And popular use of the app has actually made it kind of commonplace for everybody. So we don't think of it accessibility tool per se. It's more of a usability tool, but that's kind of how things have started. And so you go into podcasting and speech recognition and all those other sorts of things, kind of ties that into the Salli app, if you will, and gives people the ability to kind of talk to their devices and allow the device to take action without having to be at a keyboard or a computer Or a screen to kind of input their, their request.

You can do some fun things with if this, then that with the Philips Hue light bulbs as well. I have a friend who has an if this, then that set up to turn her Philips Hue bulbs on purple when it's about to rain. Yeah.

So, and that may actually be controlled through a third party like a Wemo or something along those lines. But yeah.

Or a Hue.

H-U-E. Is it a Hue?

Nope.

Yeah.

So it could be one of these formulas she's using is Prebuilt, so I'm not sure which, which service she's incorporating it from. It could be from Sally, actually.

Yep, could be. So, so closely related to If This Then That is another service which we've actually upgraded, and I have a paid version of this now called Zapier. And it, instead of using applets like what the IFTTT and that folks do. Zapier uses zaps and you have the ability to use a free plan which has limited number of zaps, limited number of items that you can connect. But if you go into one of the paid plans, whether basic, professional, or enterprise, you get faster zap connectivity. It'll synchronize every 5 minutes as opposed to like 15 or 20. It allows you more zaps on a monthly basis. So if you have a process that runs on a regular basis, it gives you the ability to kind of not run out. And that's kind of where I ran into it. I've talked a little bit in past shows about our partnership here at WSI with marketing automation software called SharpSpring, and that probably warrants its whole other Free Webinar Wednesday show because we're doing some amazing, really cool, fun stuff with SharpSpring as it relates to marketing workflows and automation and web forms and tying it into advertising. There's a lot of really geeky digital marketing things that we could dive into, but one of the zaps that I have created that I bumped my head against and I needed to upgrade is when I add somebody into my Google Contacts— again, I'm a G Suite user— I created a special label or a group essentially in there called SharpSpring contacts. And I don't have every single person in my contacts in SharpSpring, but when I come back from a conference or I have a conversation or somebody reaches out and there's someone that I want to keep tabs on, maybe have a potential business opportunity with down the road, in my Google Contacts, I'll add them to a SharpSpring group. SharpSpring synchronization group. And what I've done within the Zapier platform is I've connected Google and SharpSpring together, and it knows that anytime I add somebody to that group, it automatically synchronizes their information into my SharpSpring system. And then that gives me the ability to then use the SharpSpring platform to understand as kind of a web-based CRM, very similar to like a salesforce.com or any of those other platforms. But I now have that person in my web-based, so I can still interact with them through Google and send Gmail. But now if they interact with me through my website or fill any forms out or download any documents or read any blogs, I'm able to easily track their activity through SharpSpring. So again, scratching the surface on SharpSpring. There's a lot of really cool stuff. But very similar to what you saw within If This Then That, you can kind of scroll through and you can see all the variety of different platforms. Some of them are premium. So Unbounce, the landing page company, Magento, e-commerce content management system, you have to be a paid subscriber to be able to get access to. But if I wanted to synchronize Constant Contact with my Google Contacts, there's a Zap out there that I could use that would give me the ability to tie those 2 things together. So if what you're wanting to do in If This Then That can't be accomplished, I would suggest taking a look at Zapier. It tends to be a little bit more of a professional because it does have a paid version associated with it, multiple paid versions, and there's a good chance that what you're looking for can be accomplished through a Zapier integration.

So I'm gonna have to try this one. I wasn't familiar with this, but I see a couple that, uh, a couple things I'm doing manually that I think this could automate.

Yep. So, um, the reason that I came up, uh, and decided to, to basically purchase the business, um, kind of the basic plan, is, uh, I had returned from a conference, had a bunch of cards that I was putting into the system And the synchronization between my Google and SharpSpring stopped. And I was contacting SharpSpring. I said, hey, it's broke. It's not working. Everything was working before and it's not now. And then kind of had the light bulb go off and realized that probably should go look at Zapier. And sure enough, I had expired the available zaps for the month and it was basically sitting and waiting to recycle. And so realizing that I was gonna be using this on a much more frequent basis, I went ahead and decided that I would pull the trigger and, and purchase this. So, so this is a great little tool. So check it out and you'll have to let me know what you think, Jeff.

So. Yeah. I see it integrates with Insightly, my CRM platform. I will definitely give this one a try.

Yeah. So cool. Well, those are the 2 that I had. I don't know if you wanted to pass the baton and if you would like to share one of your little nuggets of wisdom.

I will. I found this one on my own, and then after I started using it, I was having a conversation with our frequent guest tech guru, Greg McPherson.

Yeah.

And this is one he uses as well. It's called Todoist. So it's like to-do list without the L, T-O-D-O-I-S-T. I really love it. It's, you know, I've tried a lot of task management solutions, and I just haven't found one that I bonded with. Like you, I, I like this one enough that I did upgrade to the paid version of it. And I'll just give you a couple examples of how I use it and why I chose to go with the paid version, which is really inexpensive. I'm thinking it's less than $30 a year. It's got a geo-based capability. So for example, and by the way, it integrates with Sally, so I can say, Sally, add eggs to my shopping list, and Sally will actually put it in Todoist. I can go in and set up my to-do items so that as I'm pulling into the parking lot at Costco, my iPhone will Buzz and remind me that I need to pick up these specific items. Really, really easy to do. It uses probably Google Maps as the database for location-based services. But the other thing that I like about it, I use it as a tickler system for when I want to make sure that I've paid certain bills. So electric bill, water bill, something like that. If I don't have it set up on autopay, I'll set up a Todoist item. And in the, with paid version, in the comment area, you can either store a file such as a PDF, or you can pull it off of Google Drive or similar apps and just click and see the document right on your screen. I like the way you can sort. You can look at today's task. You can look at next 7 days' tasks. It's a very easy interface. You just click and the item gets marked as done. So that's pretty much Todoist.

I use—

when I'm at my desk, I've got a Mac version installed on my desktop, which integrates across all my platforms. iPhone, iPad, and so forth.

Cool. I don't recall this one, so this must have been one of your little one-on-one conversations, or if he mentioned this, maybe it was one of those apps that he talked about that didn't have any sort of an Android app option, so I just blocked it out of my blocked it out of my, my mind.

So— I think they do have Android integration, don't they? You'll have to look there on the site, but I'm pretty sure they do. The, the premium version, which— what was it, $28.99? Includes access on all the platforms. So there's a web-based version, Windows, Mac, iOS. Yep, there's Android.

Yep. Yay! Us Android people, we're not forgotten. As well as Chrome. Yippee skippy. So very cool.

Good.

Yeah. That is pretty sweet. The, the to-do list-ish type function that we're using is, and you can use this platform For free. We've upgraded to a paid platform because we're inviting our clients in, and it's a little bit more than just to-do items. So this is— and it doesn't have the geo-awareness capabilities like what you're seeing. So I think the Todoist— and maybe I'll have to see if there's a Zapier interface between Todoist and Asana, which would be kind of cool, and then I could use them both. But the project management system that we're using that gives us the ability to create tasks and reminders and schedules It's called Asana, and we've actually used it with a couple of clients that have, that have decided they wanted to use it within their own organization to be able to do project management. And it's a lot simpler than something like, you know, Microsoft Project. It's got a pretty low kind of learning curve to it. So it's, it's pretty simple. It has a really nice mobile app that you can use. So while you're out and about, gives you the capabilities To create tasks and assign people other elements. But we've been really happy with Asana and would suggest if kind of collaborating with others within your organization or if you're serving clients, you know, that you want to be able to pull in, this is, this has got some pretty nice capabilities associated with it. You can see you've got a task list of what you're supposed to be doing today. You can check things off. It's, it's, it's a pretty cool little platform. So that was one of mine that I was saving for later, but your Todoist kinda got me thinking about Asana. So I had to make sure to share that one with you.

Let me throw one in here that kinda fits in because we've talked about project management and keeping, keeping track of tasks. And this is one I use so often. It's one of those things that I think I'm so familiar with it, I kind of overlook how powerful it is. And that is Google Drive. Google Drive just added a new feature to the version you and I are using, which I think is called G Suite. What do they call it now, Eric? G Suite for Business?

Yeah, I think it's just G Suite, if I'm not mistaken.

Okay. So G Suite, if you are on the version Eric and I are using and probably other versions, they now have a feature that was rolled out within the last few weeks called Team Drives, which I like better than what you used to have to do. Previously, you know, a person owned a folder within their Google Drive, and they could share it with others. With Team Drives, it appears in a separate place on your Google Drive, and you can share that drive. Ownership is shared with everybody that you need to. So for example, I started a project this week that there are 3 of us working on the projects. We're placed— we're actually in 3 different time zones all across the United States, and we've got this shared space that we can use. I just created a Team Drive. Have you tried that feature yet, Eric?

I, I've touched on it a little bit. And I don't know this Team Drive, because one of the things that I do with my Google Drive, and you'll see if you kind of take a look up in the top area of my little taskbar, is I utilize the Google Drive synchronization service. So I have select folders in my Google Drive synchronizing back to my computer so that if I'm not connected to the internet, I can get access. And so I almost use it as a, as a backup service. I've not seen where in the Google Drive settings you can associate a team drive and have it synchronized down to your local computer. So I don't know if you've tried that, if that's a service that you've looked at.

I am testing it out even as we speak.

If you're using that at all, And while you're talking about Google, one of the other ones that just jumped into my mind, twice over the last couple of weeks I've actually used— and some of you may be familiar with Google Hangouts, which is kind of Google's version of Skype, if you will. They've now kind of— they're in the process of making it a little bit more business class. So they've got meet.google.com. And last week there was something that I wanted to explain to Mark, and he was not in the office. He was someplace else. And I've got a giant whiteboard here in my office, and I said, if you were just here, I could just draw it on the whiteboard and show you. And so we fired up a Meet, a Google Hangout, scheduled it through Google Calendar, turned on my webcam, and I was able to basically conduct my own little Google Hangout webinar and was able to kind of get my concept across, and we agreed kind of what we're scheduling a conversation with one of our clients who hopped on Chrome and was able to get access, and we ended up spending some time walking through what we had created on the whiteboard, and it was super helpful in kind of getting our message across. So I think that Hangout tool, and occasionally I'll have maybe some intermittent issues with internet connectivity and slow speeds out here kind of in the woods, didn't have a problem whatsoever. So they must have done something to optimize bandwidth utilization because the video is great, full screen. I switched from the webcam over to my desktop and browsed a couple of websites. So it just made the remote collaboration process So much easier.

So while I did do a test, I went into the Google Drive setting that syncs with my Mac, and I do not have access to team drives. I only have access to drives that I own. So you would have to share all of the content using the online feature.

Yep. So it So maybe that's coming. I would suspect it's a new service, but I have played around with TeamDrive. The Asana platform provides us the ability to let customers upload information, but the TeamDrive can be much more of a virtual folder structure where you can say, you know, put all your business-related information, your personal-related information, your wealth management-related information. So when we're working with banks, on building websites and kind of getting content, we can structure it, structure it that way. So, cool. Excellent. Yeah, Team Drive. I didn't even think of that one, but good, good pick.

You refer to both of us as digital packrats. I guess that's true. And one of the things I love about Google Drive, including the Team Drive, is we're both on plans that we don't have any storage limits. So—

Yes.

It doesn't matter how long you wanna keep the file. As a matter of fact, I've been meaning to tell you this. Possibly some of these old Free Webinar Wednesday files I have tucked away in, in my Google Drive. So if we wanna restore them, let's chat offline, and I'll see if I have copies. Eric, I think we may have lost you on the audio. All right, everybody hang tight while I— oh, okay. I just sent a message to Eric and he's dialing back in. He'll be joining us again in just a moment. I am back.

Sorry about that.

No problem.

Can you hear me?

Yeah.

So when you're carefully trying to switch between Bluetooth headsets, it's important not to accidentally hit the hang-up button.

That rule goes along with when you're on conference calls and you're not muted through the conference service, it's important not to push the hold button with hold music.

Exactly. So luckily I disconnected and So anyway, I am back. Sorry about that. I need to keep my fingers away. It's got a giant button that just says hang up. So I am back.

So let's go on to the next service that you have selected.

Yep. The actual site here doesn't look real great because I'm logged into my account. You can go to grammarly.com and check it out. But this is a service and I'm using the free version. I'm not upgraded to premium yet. And we've talked about this. I'm just going to pull up an example of an email that I'm going to send over to Jeff. And even with the free version, and I've not run into the limitation, I think with the paid version you get some suggested content and some other editing capabilities and templates. But with Grammarly, it sits kind of in your computer. It works Microsoft. Word. Well, it works in other programs. So you can see down here in the bottom, I downloaded the most recent version of their iOS or OS X app to synchronize it with my desktop. But I've got Grammarly running here, and you can see that I've got— I can star something and upgrade to advanced corrections if I wanted to. I've got the ability to invite friends. So sent to everybody in Free Webinar Wednesday world, you all subscribe, maybe I could get free service. But at the bare-bones basic, you can see that there's actually 2 error messages that I intentionally typed these incorrectly. It wouldn't surprise me because I oftentimes— business, there's a couple of other words that just automatically get flagged because for whatever reason my fingers don't type the letters in the order that they should be typing them. But you can see, it used to be where when it found an error or a spelling— sometimes it'll pick up punctuation and other sorts of things as well— it used to be you'd hover over it and then you had to go to Grammarly to fix it. Now what they've done is they've actually included this as part of kind of just a dropdown. So it takes checkmark, which sometimes is native Chrome or some other browser browsers or in Word. And you can see more information in Grammarly. If I said no, that's the way I spell wanted, or if we've got individual names that it comes up and it refuses, um, it's spelled correctly, but I can say nope, that's the way the name— I can add that to the dictionary. But now I've got this grammar checker, and you can see it kind of gives me You know, the selections. If this were a little bit more of a complicated sentence that I didn't have— so let's see, go ahead and say, what are you doing this weekend? And so Grammarly kind of was doing its thing. Now you can see Grammarly is down. That if I hover over that, it says, hey, don't you really want to have a question mark there? Because it recognizes that I've said, what are you doing this weekend? But I've ended it with a period. So now it's changing. Oh yeah, whoops. I can go ahead and do that. So Growtally has been kind of nice. Again, there's a free version. I've not really explored it enough to determine whether or not I need to upgrade to the full-blown version. But it has started getting me thinking of things, particularly when I'm typing out lists of text and commas to separate, and I'll catch an occasional— I'll start a sentence and it'll come back and say, well, didn't you mean to say, you know, the contract is ready for review instead of contract is ready for review? So it's nice to have— Mrs. Cook. Who was my English teacher back in high school? Every time a little red underline comes up, I think it's Mrs. Grove. But I call this my little Mrs. Grove plugin that just reminds me to ensure that I'm using proper grammar and is getting done correctly. So it does tie over to my mobile device. So when typing on my Android phone, all bets are off. So who knows where my thumbs are going to go with that. But on the computer, Microsoft Word and other programs, it does a really good job. So if I'm not mistaken, Jeff, didn't you download this or weren't you using this, or am I thinking of a different platform?

I have not used Grammarly.

Okay.

Here's a side note. Have you opened a webpage that any of their current I have not.

Do they have their commercials?

Their commercials, they do. They have web-based commercials, and they're using a version of the song Get Ready 'Cause Here I Come, and it is so good. I probably spent an hour scrubbing the web to find it. Find the version of this commercial and finally found it. Yeah.

Let's see giggles if we can do great commercial. Yeah. I I believe it was Super Bowl, but I want to say one of the bigger sporting events. Might have been one of the 4. I think I saw a Grammarly television commercial, actually, which surprised me because, um, yeah, it's right at the right end of life, uploaded by Grammarly. So there's several of those. So, um, so go out, do yourself a little Google search for YouTube Grammarly and, uh, see what sorts of Cool stuff you can stumble upon.

Did you fall in love with the song? None of the song recognition services give you the right version. Shoot me an email and I'll tell you where you can get a demo version of the song for free. I've actually got two tools similar to Grammarly that I'll share with you.

Yes, let her rip.

One is called ProWritingAid. P-R-O-W-R-I-T-I-N-G-A-I-D. T-I-N-G-A-I-D. And this service is between $40 and $45 a year.

ProWritingAid.

Uh-huh.

All right. Let's see what we got here. Writing improvement software. Dun dun dun.

There's the free version.

Oh, come on. I clicked on the wrong link. Here we go.

So this is really helpful for anybody that is doing web content or doing any type of published work. It's got a grammar checking feature, and then also there is a— the version that's $5 more has the ability to go out and do a web search for plagiarism.

Okay. This is one of those instances where I said, remember, sometimes my internet activity seems to be a little Spontaneously, here it goes.

What was—

I'll see if I can get that one to come up. Okay.

The other one, and I actually cannot use this one. This one is not Mac friendly. It's only Windows.

Okay.

It's called— I'm not sure you have— how you pronounce it. It's spelled K-T-O-O-L-S. I would guess Kutools. This is a— has a plugin for Word. I read a really good review of it. Okay. But those are 2 additional options that provide the same or similar services that Grammarly offers.

Okay.

It looks like Grammarly is probably the most widely used and most well-known.

Yeah, I would think so. So I've, I've, I honestly, when they made the change to the interface and they started including some of the like just click to reveal and didn't have to go to a separate window that opened up, I thought for a minute that somehow they got my credit card and they flipped me over into a paid subscription and they were charging me because it became that much more convenient. And so I logged in like, how did they get my credit card? I've not given them— but maybe I signed up for a trial or something, I don't know. Um, but I hopped over and sure enough I was still using the free version. So it, uh, it, it just kind of has enhanced and made things better just by its very nature. So kind of cool. All right, so it looks like that's loading again. And here's the cool tools. So it looks like they've got, uh, Some automated functionality for Word. I also saw that there was a reference for Excel as well.

Mm-hmm.

So it looks like they've got all different sorts of options here. So yeah, so those of you that are PC users, this might be something you want to check out. I do see that we have a few bankers, and just as a reminder, anytime I make a recommendation for downloading, I probably should have Just double-check with your IT department, or if you're part of an organization, you're doing this on a work computer. The last thing Jeff or I want is for IT managers to kind of yell at us and tell us that we've encouraged them to download stuff. So maybe you don't even have access to download if you're on a work computer, but just make sure, double-check, because Jeff and I come out of the banking space and we know that installing unauthorized software and apps and other sorts of things, even though productivity may be gained. You just want to make sure that you're not violating any sort of corporate IT policies. So we'll give our little disclosure there. And ProWritingAid has finally come up, so we can kind of— cool assessment tools. So good stuff there. So I might come back and—

This one I think is really good. I— yeah. I spent a little bit of time researching this one, and I really liked what I saw. Yep.

Cool. And you'll get some of this with the Grammarly service as well. So poke versus pokes and some of the other elements. So good stuff.

Cool.

All right. Quick little time check here. Let's see, what's one of the others? So this is a tool that I like. Let me mention this, and there used to be a couple of them out there. I know, Jeff, you and I years ago— I can say it now because we have years of history at Free Webinar Wednesdays— do you remember the service that we introduced here called Tungle? Tungle.me?

That's the one that was bought by BlackBerry, wasn't it?

Yep, and then unfortunately quickly deep-sixed and discontinued. But the, the Tungle service was one that allowed you to connect your address or your calendar— I'll get it right here— your calendar to a service that then published it out to the rest of the world showing availability, and people could go to your Tungle.me page and they could select an appointment and request time to be able to get to meet with you. And one of the things that's always a little bit of a pain anytime you get ready to book an appointment with somebody, you're emailing back and forth. Or as was the case just prior to Free Webinar Wednesdays, I was talking with a client who needed to get with the agency who wanted to schedule time with me, and I just said, just go to my Doodle page, pull up my availability, and then get whoever else in the bank you need to talk to get the agency on the phone, whatever the case is, and you can see my availability, and then that's going to give you direct access to schedule a time for me. And so if you, for example, go to doodle.com/ericcook, that will take you to my branded Doodle page. Other than the fact that in a business setting, if I'm wanting to schedule a call, with somebody who's in a bank and I say, go to my Doodle page, it sounds somewhat goofy. But once they get over that, it's okay. But you go to doodle.com/ericcook, and what this has done— and I think I'm paying for a business version of this, so I get to change my background a little bit and some other functionality. But when you go to this page, this is synchronizing with my calendar in G Suite. Presenting my availability, not telling anybody necessarily what I've got going on. So if it's a doctor's appointment or a client meeting or whatever the case is, it doesn't say what I'm doing, but it tells whether or not I'm available. So you can see this pulls up. Somebody would like to meet me next week. They can go in here, click on the week of the 17th. Maybe they want to meet at 1 o'clock on Tuesday. They can go in, they can put that information in. If they need only 30 minutes, they can shrink it down. If they want more time than that, they can make it bigger. And then you can put in what the topic is, and then you scroll to the bottom, you just create a meeting request. This is one of the other emails that comes through that I've identified through If This Then That that rings to my phone because this is somebody that's wanting to actually meet with me, have a conversation. So I need to double-check and make sure that I confirm that it's going to work okay on my calendar. So if you ever schedule— again, they have a free version that you can use to get started, so you don't have to use the paid version. But if you find that scheduling appointments and meetings is a little bit of a cumbersome process, you can get yourself a free Doodle account. You can synchronize your calendar, and you can send people that link and just allow them to pick the time in order to go ahead and get access. I'll tell you, everybody that's used this thus far has been really pleased and excited about not going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Just super easy and simple to be able to use. So, Jeff, are you using any sort of like calendaring kind of an appointment setting? I know there's a couple of other versions out there that we've talked about, but this one seems to work the best for me.

I have used some in the past. I'm not currently. But, you know, I've used your doodle and it works well. Yep.

So cool. We've got time for one more. Do you have anything that you would like to share or—

Go for it.

Remember I said we wouldn't go the full hour? Yeah.

And remember I said that we will. Yeah. That we will.

The last service that we've just started using here within the office is a service called Status.io, and this is a status platform kind of site that allows us to log in and publish availability of all the different platforms and services that we're providing for our customers. And so if we kind of take a look at our status page here, we've got a status.poweredbywsi.com that now has the ability, and you can see last update was 5 hours ago. We can go through and we've got our hosting platforms for website, our marketing automation services. If we're doing digital advertising, if our, if our platform is up or down, you know, any of the things that we're working on, our project management hub, which is Asana. We manage G Suite for a couple of nonprofits. As new services get introduced by WSI and we offer them to our clients, we can now place those within our Status.io page. And if there is a downtime or an interruption or planned migration or maintenance period, We can very easily, through the backend of the system, create an update, and then all of our clients over time can click on this subscribe button, and that will give them the ability to get notifications. So if our web hosting company is going to do maintenance on Friday morning at 3 AM, we can put that in as a known maintenance period, and anybody that is on that hosting platform can subscribe. Now they'll get notification automatically. And in the olden days, What we were doing is we had different email groups set up and we would send a message and we'd blind copy people. And we've just gotten to the point where there's just so many different things that we're offering that we're just going to give everybody the ability to come to one spot. It's, it's not inexpensive. I think it's close to $700 or $800 a year. So it's, it's one that we've invested some money into. But I think the communication that we're giving back to our clients and the ability for them to know what's going on is way going to be offset. You know, the benefit's going to be much, much greater than the cost that we've spent on this. And it'll just make things a whole lot easier. And obviously, the goal with all of— anytime you're using any sort of an uptime or status availability is you hope that you never have to use it. So, we don't ever want our services to go down or become unavailable. But in an instance like that, when it does happen, the best thing that you can do is just provide clear and consistent communication So that everybody knows what's going on, and this allows everybody to get very quickly on the same page and know what's happening. So this is kind of its first introduction to the wild. We are in the process of drafting a kind of an email to our clients to officially kick it off. But as I was sharing kind of ideas and thoughts about efficiency and using technology to help make things easier and faster, this was certainly an example. I wanted to share with everybody. So if you, if you happen to be a client of ours and would like to subscribe and don't want to wait for the official invitation email, you're getting a sneak peek here. You can go ahead and click on the subscribe button and that'll get you into the system and you can subscribe to the statuses that you, that you desire to be subscribed to. So that is the last one that I have, Jeffrey. So I think I am done. Anything? you've got as final words of wisdom before we close for the week?

I think we're good. This is fun. I actually have at least 2, possibly 3 things I'm gonna try. Probably one as soon as we finish the webinar.

I'm thinking it might be Zapier and your Insightly, if I'm not mistaken.

Actually, Zapier and my phone service.

There you go.

Cool. Good, good.

Well, that concludes this week's Free Webinar Wednesdays. Thanks everybody for joining us live. If you're watching the recording and you're still here, thanks for hanging in there and listening to the recording. Hopefully you got some cool ideas on ways to help technology work for you instead of the other way around. If you've got suggestions or other apps or services that you use, feel free to leave them in the comments on our site, or you can just email either Jeff or myself and get in touch. We'd love to hear from you. But until next time, we are signing off. We'll see you at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, have a great week, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.